Sure, I only have a wrench in my pocket, I’m standing on top of some flimsy scaffolding and there is a mass of zombies coming my way … but trust me, I’ve got this situation well in hand.

I hop off the scaffolding, and run along a side street, picking up some batteries and a mask that looks like Blanka from Street Fighter. Quickly combo-ing them together, I now have electricity powers. Yep.

I shove into a crowd of zombies and electrocute all of them. There are still countless more behind me. This is one heck of a mask.

I race up to the roof of a shopping complex and hop on a motorcycle, spinning it around and shooting off a ramp two floors up. The world pauses as the glass shatters around me and then I’m at street level again, zooming past the teeming undead mass. It’s glorious.

I slam the motorcycle into a cement flattener, jump out and combine the to vehicles into a flame-belching Roller Hawg before the zombie horde behind me knows what’s happening. Almost instantly, I’m on the thing’s back whipping it around and mowing into the crowd, dual flamthrowers spewing heat into the unending swarm of zombies. I rev the engine forward and they’re turned into a fine mist under the roller pin.

I’m going to get so much PP.

____

Josh Bridge and Mike Jones introduce themselves with an apology.

They’re wearing matching black shirts and slacks and have essentially the same short-cropped haircut. Together, they kind of look like the nerd-chic versions of Mormon missionaries.

“This is our standard producer uniform,” says Bridge, the Executive Producer on Dead Rising 3, says by way of an apology.

“We didn’t plan this, honestly,” continues Jones, also a producer.

We are in the top floor boardroom of Capcom Vancouver’s Burnaby studio getting ready for a demo of the Xbox One launch game.

Microsoft has flown me out from Toronto for the hands-on presentation, and Bridge and Jones are two of the handful of top-team members on hand to take us through the game.

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Apologies of matching appearance aside, it became clear the duo has a very specific vision for the game and that it has equally specific visions for the game’s quality. Peppered around the studio are signs showing what (very high) Metacritic rating the team hopes for, with a simple message: Believe.

The first Dead Rising game was released in 2006, about nine months after the release of the Xbox 360. The game was produced by Capcom in Japan and led by producer Kenji Inafune, the creator of the iconic Mega Man character. The game dropped you in the role of photojournalist Frank West as he navigated a zombie infested mall in near-future America.

Central to the game was its punishing time and save systems. You had a finite number of hours to make your way through the zombie-filled mall, and if you missed helping certain people they were dead forever. If you died, you had two unappealing options: either go back to the last time you saved (save stations were few and far between) or restart the game entirely with your character progression intact.

Both of these elements are gone in DR3, relegated to a special “Nightmare Mode” of the game which is far more difficult. Instead of the timer being the greatest threat, it’s the zombies themselves who pose the toughest challenge for players.

“We wanted to take what we really loved about the franchise, all of these zombies, playing how you want, and just embrace that and maybe escape some of the limitations that were there before,” Bridge says.

“We have two modes now, a mode where you have the ability to take your time and really explore the world and really pace the game the way you want, as well as a classic fan mode, Nightmare mode, that puts the shackles on you. Even I wanted something like this in Dead Rising 1, though I liked the time constraint. But I also really wanted the freedom.”

This isn’t Capcom Vancouver’s first crack at Dead Rising. When the studio was still known as Blue Castle Games, the Western-Canadian startup was known primarily for its work on the sports franchise The Bigs, before being contracted by Capcom to make Dead Rising 2.

DR2 was a far more traditional take on the Dead Rising formula, featuring both a timer and save system reminiscent of the first game. And this came despite having to build the game from scratch.

“We had to re-create the game by looking at videos of the first Dead Rising,” Bridge says laughing. “We didn’t get any code to build from.”

Capcom was impressed enough with the studio’s work on the sequel that it bought Blue Castle and renamed it Capcom Vancouver.

A lot has changed at Capcom since Blue Castle started on DR2, most notably, Inafune left Capcom after a public disagreement over the company’s direction and the direction of all Japanese game companies. He is currently working on a Kickstarted Mega-man-like game called Mighty No. 9.

When asked if the changes with the Xbox One sequel come because the team has more freedom and control over the game after Inafune’s exit from Capcom, it was clear from the producers’ instant reaction that they hold nothing but the greatest respect for the much lauded creator.

The rethink was made, instead they say, because of the larger more open world available to them thanks to the next generation of consoles, and to the desire to make the game more accessible to players who avoided the high-stress nature of earlier iterations.

“With the Xbox One, we had the ability to make a way bigger world, and way more detail that can go into that world,” Bridge says.

“We wanted to go truly open-world this time around. No more load screens, with the biggest world that we’ve been able to make, with loads of zombies. And in doing this, we needed to hold on to the brand pillars of Dead Rising: everything and anything is a weapon, as well as the ability to play the way you want.”

The changes in the formula haven’t sat well with some fans of the series, who feel that the essence of Dead Rising lies in both the game’s punishing structure in addition to the goofy open-world playbox nature of how you can attack hordes of zombies with silly and creative combo-weapons.

When the game was first revealed at E3, much was made of the fact that it presented a darker, grimeyer zombie story than the previous games.

“We still have humour, but it’s really up to you to evoke it,” Bridge says.

What this means is that while the open-world zaniness of the previous Dead Rising games is more than apparent in the game’s open world structure, the story in DR3 presents a darker face to the world.

The team says this wasn’t some sort of on-high marketing mandate from Capcom or Microsoft, but an aesthetic choice from Capcom Vancouver itself as it was baked into every aspect of the game: something that was needed with the move to a larger, more detailed game in next-gen.

“We’ve been taking some flack over ‘oh, you’ve just gone Call of Duty,‘ but we’re not just one note,” says senior producer Jason Leigh.

“There’s a huge spectrum of it being serious and mainstream, but if you delve in you can do some really ridiculous stuff.”

More pressing for the studio, however, were early complaints that the game was not performing especially well on a technical level, with early reports of the game running at slide-show-like frame-rates.

The two demos I saw in early August ran much better than the game did at E3, (a demonstration of a biker-gang boss battle looked particularly nice) though both still had technical issues and neither regularly hit 30 frames per second. On the one hand, this was a surprising amount of improvement in a short period of time. On the other hand, it’s likely going to be the thing people say about the game if it isn’t fixed in time for launch.

When asked about the game’s performance, the team said the Xbox One hardware is still in the process of being finalized (just a few days before the interview, Microsoft upped Xbox One’s graphics processor speed), and that because the game was an Xbox One exclusive, Microsoft was very hands on about helping them out and taking the team’s input.

“It’s definitely challenging,” said Liam Gilbride, Technical Art Director. “We are working closely with them. There are a lot of trips back and forth. We have [their guys] coming up here, we have guys going down there to talk with them. They’re a helpful group, they are aware of our unique challenges…. They’ve been quite receptive to feedback, and they’ve offered some good suggestions to solve our problems.”

One of the major technical issues the team faces stems from two core design decisions. First, the game was going to have a whole heap-load of zombies on screen at once and second (and more importantly) that there would be no loading screens anywhere in the game, something the team describes as its largest technical challenge.

“We don’t have the luxury of putting up a load screen,” Gilbride says.

“We made that decision early on. So that became a big part of our decision making process. We kept have to ask ‘How can we make this seamless?’ while still getting all of the data that we needed to get in … But it really hurt the user experience in DR2, hitting that load screen over and over and we wanted the world to feel bigger.”

“Yeah, when we were done with [implementing no load screens], we were like ‘why didn’t we do that before?’,” Bridge says jovially. “It only took us six months to figure out.”

Ultimately, it’s these technical issues, and the team’s ability to solve them, which will likely determine the fate of the game and if it will be thought of kindly when it launches in November.

Whether the team will hit their ambitious marks is anyone’s guess at this point. In the bits and pieces of the game that they showed in Vancouver (and they let us play the Dead Rising 3 demo they had set up for almost three hours), there were certainly the elements for a top-tier, breakout launch game for the Xbox One. Not every game can say that three and a half months out from launch. However, things could just as easily fall short of what they hope, and the game could be an interesting side-attraction.

Yet if it hits, DR3 has the potential to be a key differentiatior between the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 launches, and has the potential to be the next-gen only game that everyone is talking about.